


Transmission

by aireyv



Category: Metal Gear
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Drugs, Gen, Interrogation, Truth Serum, really bad trip
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-18
Updated: 2020-08-18
Packaged: 2021-03-06 02:07:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,976
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25975675
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aireyv/pseuds/aireyv
Summary: And we would go on as though nothing was wrong/And hide from these days we remained all alone/Staying in the same place, just staying out the time/Touching from a distance/Further all the time
Comments: 6
Kudos: 5
Collections: Metal Gear Solid - Summer Games -2020





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Summer Games really be out here giving me the opportunity to polish up old scraps I never did anything with.. thank you...  
> This segment was written as a way to reconcile Otacon going from presumed terrorist at the end of the tanker chapter to security systems architect for the Big Shell.

The door finally opened, snapping Otacon out of his doze. He attempted to stretch his aching shoulders, but the handcuffs didn’t exactly let him do that.

“Trying to escape?” said the man who had just walked into the room, a CIA operative who looked like he might have been Russian at some point. “You can’t, you know.”

Otacon just looked at him. He knew better than to open his mouth.

“From now on, you’ll be under constant surveillance,” said the interrogator, slowly circling him like a vulture, “your every move will be recorded - every step you take, every word you say, and God forbid you try to  _ contact _ someone… we’ll hear and see  _ everything _ you do, Dr. Emmerich. So,” he continued, stopping in front of Otacon and leaning forward slightly, hands in his pockets, “I’m sure you knew this. Why’d you come here?”

“Could you uncuff me, please?” Otacon said in a low voice.

The interrogator slammed a foot squarely between Otacon’s legs, against the seat of the chair, and tilted it back. Otacon strained to sit up, heart suddenly pounding in an instinctual response to the possibility of falling over backwards.

“Let me get one thing straight, Dr. Emmerich,” the interrogator said calmly, foot still keeping the chair delicately balanced, “you are _ far _ from a  _ normal  _ suspect or prisoner. You have  _ no _ rights - no lawyer, no option to remain silent. Legally, you’re a non-person and you’ll stay that way until we figure out what we want to do with you.”

“W-What do you want to do right now?” Otacon stammered. “You’re not just keeping me here, are you?”

“No,” said the interrogator, “we want information. Naturally.” He let the front two feet of Otacon’s chair hit the floor again. “Today we’ll be starting with a simple question: why’d you come here?”

“To the CIA?” Otacon said.

“Sure.”

“I… I want protection,” Otacon said, looking at the ground.

There was a pause. “Protection,” the interrogator said at length.

“Yes,” Otacon said, hopefully not a little too quickly, “we, in Philanthropy, made a lot of enemies - with Snake gone, I-I can’t protect myself. I’ll be hunted down and killed.”

“So you in order to save your tail, you went to the US government,” the interrogator said, “one of the enemies you made.”

“I can’t make it on my own,” Otacon said, still avoiding his eyes. “But I figured you’d be the least likely to kill me.” There was a short pause.

He glanced up just in time for interrogator to sock him in the face.

“So you’re selling yourself and your organization out for a little  _ safety? _ ” he said as Otacon gasped in pain. “Really, Dr. Emmerich?” Otacon realized with a creeping chill that there was vengeful look in the interrogator’s eye that meant that things were only going to get worse from here.

“ _ What _ organization?” Otacon said, tilting his head back slightly to keep his crooked, now-broken-in-one-lens glasses from sliding off his nose. “Philanthropy is done for. Snake is… Snake is dead.”

“Dead,” the interrogator deadpanned.

“Dead,” Otacon repeated hollowly. There should be no reason for him to  _ doubt _ it, but something told Otacon that the interrogator was going to be approaching him under the assumption that everything he said was a lie.

“And why is that?” he said.

Otacon’s eyes flicked to the ground again. “The tanker he was on sank. I couldn’t even recover his body for a month - you know that!”

“Why did the tanker sink?”

“I don’t know,” Otacon said, still looking at the floor. “I only knew what Snake told me over radio. When the tanker went down, I… didn’t hear anything about it. I saw it sink but I don’t know hap- aah!” While he was talking, the interrogator had circled around him again and grabbed his hair without any warning, yanking his head to the side. Another second and he had injected something right into Otacon’s jugular while he half-screamed. Truth serum, probably.

“I’m telling the truth,” Otacon said, gritting his teeth.

“Sure you are, Dr. Emmerich,” the interrogator said.

Otacon blinked rapidly. Already he was starting to feel sleepy and light-headed.  _ Concentrate _ , he told himself, coughing uncomfortably. “Why would Snake sink the tanker? Or - or even if he wanted to, why would I  _ let _ him sink the tanker? If you knew any of the Marines on the tanker, I-I’m sorry, but it wasn’t our fault. W-We never wanted to hurt anyone.”

“That’s cute, coming from a couple of terrorists,” the interrogator said, sliding a cap onto the needle of the spent syringe and sticking it in his jacket pocket. “But I wasn’t asking if Solid Snake sunk the tanker.”

“You think there was someone else on the tanker…?” Otacon said. A shiver ran through his body.

“Can’t say for sure,” he said, “but I do wonder if  _ you _ weren’t behind it somehow.”

“W-What?”

“I wonder if you didn’t sacrifice your comrade - and all the men on that tanker - so you could go running to us for  _ protection _ ,” the interrogator hissed.

“I’m not-“ Otacon coughed again. “I wouldn’t-!”

His chair was kicked over sideways. Otacon screamed as the edge of its back - and the full weight of both it and himself - landed on his right forearm, near the elbow. Pain shot up his arm. Probably fractured, if not outright broken.

“…of course,” said the interrogator while Otacon shivered on the floor, groaning, “that’s just one possibility. The other possibility is that Solid Snake isn’t actually dead, and you’re really after something else here.”

“H-He’s not,” Otacon said, “he’s - dead. I saw the body, i-it had that transmitter on it, remember, and they did the DNA test already-“

“Hm,” the interrogator said, crouching down next to Otacon, “well, either way… you’re double-crossing  _ someone _ , aren’t you?”

“I’m not,” Otacon moaned. The interrogator pulled out another syringe. “I’m not, I swear, please don’t- please don’t hurt me-“

He injected him right at the already-sore sight of his previous injection. Otacon struggled to keep his eyes open for a little longer but soon the whole world went black.

He woke up in a small, brightly-lit room. He blinked a few times, realized that the obstruction in his vision was a thin crack running across one of the lens in his glasses, and looked around. There was a sink with a mirror above it, a metal-framed bed with a thin mattress and no blanket, and a toilet and crude shower with a curtain partitioning them from the rest of the room. There was also a small security camera in the corner opposite that.

Otacon sat up with difficulty, noting the bruises on his left arm and the heavy white cast around his right. The bed looked awfully inviting right now, but he was terribly thirsty and had a bad taste in his mouth that he headed to the sink to get rid of.

He stared at himself in the mirror when he was done drinking awkwardly from the faucet. He had a brilliant black eye and he could see two needle-marks on the left side of his neck, with two different small lines of dried blood at ninety-degree angles from each other.

…how did he get these injuries? The last thing he remembered, he was in what he could only assume was the “questioning room”, sitting in a chair with his arms handcuffed behind him. He’d been there for so long - how long, even, he wasn’t sure. And then suddenly he was here.

Remembering that retrograde amnesia was one of the side effects of truth serum, he swallowed hard and laid down on the bed. He was bone-tired and aching all over… he couldn’t even raise Snake on Codec. Either this room had too much harmonic resonance, or the CIA had examined Otacon and found out he had a Codec and was blocking the signal.

_ What would I do even if he _ could  _ answer me? _ he thought, taking off his glasses and resting his relatively-non-injured arm over his eyes.  _ If I said anything, they’d hear, and I don’t think they’d chalk it up to me talking to myself. Who knows what would happen then… _

So what choice did he have but to endure?


	2. Chapter 2

The chair again. His arms weren’t cuffed behind him, as per usual, probably because, due to the bulky cast on his right arm this time, his other arm was zip-tied to it just above the wrist. Naturally, any handcuff big enough to fit around the cast would just slip off of Otacon’s other hand.

“What’s that?” he asked nervously as the interrogator pushed the air out of a syringe filled with clearish fluid.

“Have you ever heard of Project MKUltra?” the interrogator said. Otacon was silent. He continued: “From the early fifties all the way up until 1973, the CIA wanted to know if it was possible to control minds. We tried a lot things - hypnosis, torture, sensory deprivation, isolation, and, of course…” He gestured using the syringe. “…drugs.”

Otacon swallowed hard. “I thought MKUltra failed.”

“Failed the mind control aspect, yes,” the interrogator said, grabbing Otacon’s hair and pushing his head to the side. “But the nice thing about hallucinogens is that, when you take them, you tend to hallucinate whatever’s been weighing on you heavily.”

“So you think I’ll see - someone I’ve worked with, and you want to observe how I’ll react,” Otacon said, watching the interrogator’s syringe-hand closely and breathing quick and shallow.

The interrogator chuckled. “There’s our MIT grad,” he said, and plunged the needle into Otacon’s neck. After some seconds, he withdrew, turned, and walked out of the room. The door shut with an ominous _ clang _ .

Otacon had literally never done drugs in his life. Not even marijuana or Ritalin like some of his fellow students had back when he was at MIT. Hallucinogens? He’d only heard  _ stories _ about them.

The walls were starting the breathe.

And the buzz of the florescent light was very loud.

Otacon’s eye flicked towards the door. He needed to find a way out of here - no, he needed to find a way to get them to give up on the interrogations… on the torture. He’d tell them everything they wanted to know - he’d  _ been _ telling them everything they wanted to know - or rather everything they wanted to  _ hear _ . He glanced around at the shadowed corners of the room. They were… slowly changing colors?

He was going numb all over, and all of a sudden his head felt simultaneously very light and very heavy. He slid off his chair, lying face-up on the floor with his legs bent behind him at a yoga-like angle that would normally hurt but didn’t really bother him now. The dust floated in the light.

_ This isn’t so bad. I can make it through this just fine. _

_ I won’t say anything. _

He needed to get past this torture so that the CIA could force him to use his hacking skills to their ends. They’d do this. It was too tempting to pass up. He’d be carefully monitored, but - as long as there wasn’t someone physically watching his screen, he could get around it.

And then he’d have their servers.

Maybe they knew that was his plan. Maybe this was part of  _ their  _ plan. Make it look like an accident.

The injection site was starting to burn.

_ They’re trying to kill me. _

Otacon sat up, the whole world spinning violently around him as he did, like a kaleidoscope on a centrifuge.

He glanced at the shadows in the corners of the room again. Why, why couldn’t this room be better-lit? The shadows were  _ moving _ .

The shadows were moving and there were people in them and they were coming to get him.

They were coming to get him and they were coming to kill him or else keep him locked up here forever with him hallucinating like this the whole time and he’d never see Snake again, never see Mei Ling, never find out what happened to Nastasha,

never get to tell E.E. he was sorry.

They were going to kill him unless he figured a way out of this and he figured it out  _ now _

He pulled his hands apart as far as he could. Pulled and pulled. The zip-tie held fast, cutting into the skin and flesh on the back of his arm,

and it was going in and deep and

there was blood running down his arm and pooling over the floor,

and the thinner, more delicate skin over his wrist was rubbing against the rough surface of the cast and being scraped away a bit at a time. There was a lot of blood and he couldn’t stand to look at it and it  _ hurt _ but he didn’t feel particularly inclined to stop.

Part of it was desperation. Part of it was that pain didn’t matter now. It was like the first time he’d drank a beer and realized that he no longer hated the taste of it.

He looked at the shadows again. Who was it? There was a human-life figure there, he was sure of it, he just couldn’t

couldn’t make out the face

, who was it

?

th at

the the interrogator

back for more/

right?

He blinked rapidly, trying to crawl away, leave scuff tracks across the floor in his own blood.

It was so dark in here

The light was hurting his eyes.

“Get away from me,” he groaned

he was speaking, saying too much and

_ This room has four corners _

who was it who was it

Gray Fox? with a sword ?

his slimy no-good bastard of a father

?

he shut his eyes. didn’t want to see any of this. had to get out of here. had to

was he supposed to be this dizzy?

was he supposed to be making this weak wheezing trembling moan

please ju st

END

he knew this would, this

would happen he knew it would but he didn’t think an

yth in g like thi s

wou ld

/? , wh.y

and look there was Snake in another corner of the room another dark corner of the room where the shadows were tall and they gathered there and it almost looked like a person and Otacon knew on some level that there couldn’t be a person there because he would have seen them come in and he didn’t see them come in but here he was anyway in the corner of the room there was a person there was a man and the man had a face and the face was Snake’s but

the face was Snake’s and the whole body was Snake’s but he was hiding in the shadows and Otacon asked him “How did you get here” and of course he didn’t answer because the only thing Otacon could hear was the rushing of his own blood in his own ears because his heart was pounding and besides that he could hear the intolerable buzz of the light above him where all the dust motes swirled around like the sand in the wind that day in Afghanistan when he was three and Snake was here Snake was here and Otacon was begging him “Please answer me Snake please I need to get out of here can you get me out of here I’m bleeding I’ve hurt myself they’ve hurt me Snake can’t you see”

and Snake didn’t say anything because Snake was dead Snake was fucking dead and decomposing and his body looked just like the way Liquid’s body had looked the first time Otacon had seen it out of the same bodybag they’d stolen it in he was discolored and dripping and bloated and he’d drowned he had drowned and didn’t that mean it was all Otacon’s fault because he was the one with the boat “Snake please you can’t be dead” but he was “Snake please I’m sorry Snake I tried to rescue you why didn’t you get in the boat why are you dead” and he wasn’t moving from the corner and Otacon thought maybe he should go there himself go to the corner but he was absolutely seized with terror and he couldn’t move at all and he could barely think except for thinking about Snake and Snake being dead and this couldn’t be this couldn’t be happening he was hallucinating “Snake no, Snake, please, no, Snake, Snake! SNAKE!!  _ SNAAAAAAAAAAAKE!! _ ”

Meanwhile, in the room with the camera feed from the interrogation chamber, the interrogator was drinking a nice cup of black coffee.

“He’s… he’s just screaming,” said one of the video jockeys. “What exactly is this supposed to accomplish?”

“I figured he’d see Solid Snake,” the interrogator said, “or whoever he sold out Solid Snake to, depending on what happened. And depending on what happened, he’d say different things. …at least that was the theory.”

“Yeah, this isn’t very useful,” said the other video jockey, pulling one of her earbuds out of her ear. “He’s terrified, not saying anything coherent.”

“I’ll be the judge about whether or not it’s useful when I listen to the recording later,” the interrogator said. “Can you tell what he’s seeing, though?”

“Well… he was yelling ‘Snake! Snake!’ a minute ago,” said the first video jockey. “So he must being seeing Solid Snake.”

“He sounded pretty surprised to see him… and horrified,” the second video jockey said. “Does this mean he really  _ is _ dead?”

The interrogator grunted. “I’m more inclined to believe it now… although it’s not proof.”

“You’d think the positively-identified body would be all the proof you need,” she muttered to herself, then stood up from her chair urgently, eyes glued to the surveillance camera monitor. “Alright, he’s passed out. Call the nurse.”

“I’m almost surprised he didn’t  _ completely _ skin himself trying to get his hands loose,” the first video jockey said with a low whistle. “That’s a lot of blood…”


End file.
